


Lessons in Aerodynamics

by marenubium87



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Apparently this is just a bunch of random aeronautical info disguised as a story, Don't forget that Tracer was a test pilot and all, Gen, Mention of Amelie/Widowmaker, Military aircraft, Overwatch family cameos, Past Memories, Tracer is an aeronautical geek because yes, Tracer/McCree friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-08-17 03:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8127844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marenubium87/pseuds/marenubium87
Summary: Stall - an aerodynamic condition in which the wings of an aircraft stop producing lift, leading to uncontrolled descent.Three... er, actually four, actually, um... I don't even know anymore... vignettes of Tracer, and aerodynamics.It's mostly Tracer, with a bit of McCree.  The other characters tagged do make appearances, although if you've been led here with the hope of seeing a lot of them you're going to be sad.This is apparently just a bunch of aerodynamics trivia somehow disguised as a story.  Enjoy?Rating adjusted for language.





	1. The Kid

“You were a test pilot, right?”

“I was, love!”

“Can you tell me a little more about the aerodynamic stalls you’ve done?”

She’d been all zippy cheer this morning as Ms. Humboldt’s class entered the facility for their Overwatch Field Trip Day. Everyone else had groaned.

“Why do we have to do this, again?” Jesse whined.

“Public relations, community service,” Winston had replied, without looking up from his half-empty jar of peanut butter. Lena blinked over to the counter, popping off two bananas from the bunch, and tossing one to Winston, who one-handed it without even turning.

“It’ll be fun, won’t it now?” she’d said. Angela had smiled her usual smile, the one that was so motherly and caring and patient sometimes one wondered if she was an actual saint returned to the land of the mortals. Mercy took a sip of her coffee. “It’s an important reminder of what we fight for.”

After an hour with little Timmy though, Lena was eating her words.

Ms. Humboldt visibly rolled her eyes at the latest of the second-grader’s questions, questions born less out of curiosity and one more of a “hey I read about this on the extranet and look I know the buzzwords and look at how precocious and intelligent I am”. They’d dealt with it all morning. Lena could only imagine the suffering poor old Ms. Humboldt had endured.

Winston calmly pushed his glasses back up his nose. Jesse fingered the revolver, still (thankfully) holstered at his belt (for now). Angela shot him a disapproving look. _No shooting children._

Jesse glanced back at the stern motherly figure with a hint of pleading. _I want a free pass. For -him-._

Ange gave him another warning look, before turning back to the class with the sweetest, heart-melting smile ever. The woman possessed an ungodly amount of patience.

It’s not like Lena was actually considering pulling her pulse pistols on the kid… but it’s not like Jesse didn’t have the right idea, either.

_Time to take you down a peg, you arrogant little shit._

“Well, Timmy, as you know, an aerodynamic stall is nothing like when someone accidentally depolarizes the magnetic inductors on their car engine. In fact, an aerodynamic stall has nothing to do with an aircraft’s powerplant at all.”

Timmy listened, nodding smugly, feigning understanding.

“Now, Timmy, since I know you already know all the basics, let me show you something that I think is just quite splendid, really,” dialing her natural exuberance up to eleven. She punched a few commands into the holographic board in front of the students, and up popped a graph, dots and lines and figures splattered over its surface.

Lena smiled as she ingested the data, that familiar comfort from what felt like another lifetime ago never having really left.

“All test pilots are aeronautical nerds, first,” she said, unable to help the broad, genuine grin plastered on her face. “We have to be. You need to understand everything you possibly can about the airplane you’re flying, before you even sit in that cockpit.”

“Anyway, this is a graph of C-sub-L versus alpha for the XLR-29, which I test-piloted just before I joined Overwatch. You can see here that C-L increases...” she gestured to the line of ascending dots on the graph, “as we increase alpha, until it tops out right around… (the dots rose to a peak, leveled off, and then began falling on the other side of the hill at a precipitous rate) here, at twenty-two degrees. Past twenty-two degrees, which we call the critical angle of attack, C-L falls. And I bet you can tell the class why that is, right?”

The entire class’s eyes were on Timmy, who seemed to wilt by the second. He stared at the graph, unblinking. She waited. The seconds passed, as his face grew red.

“Aw, Timmy, this is where the wing stops producing lift and the plane enters an aerodynamic stall, as you surely knew, right?” The class laughed. Ms. Humboldt even managed a chuckle. Timmy looked as if he wanted to implode and have the earth swallow him whole, on the spot.

Tracer looked around, smiling that exuberant, innocent smile that couldn’t help but be endearing. Winston shot her a look equal parts admonishing and grateful. Jesse looked like he wanted to give her a high five. She resisted, but only just.

“Who has another question?” Ange asked with that irritatingly warm and genuine motherly smile.

Timmy’s hand, for the first time that day, did not shoot up.

(edit 9/24 - added notes.  tweaked a couple words.  ugh, perfectionism.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plane is obviously fictional but the concept Tracer describes is actually from real-life aerodynamics.
> 
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d1/Lift_curve.svg/680px-Lift_curve.svg.png
> 
> This is an actual graph of CL (lift-coefficient) versus alpha (angle of attack) for some undefined generic aircraft. Past the critical angle of attack (the peak of the hill on the graph) the lift falls off and the wing (and thus the aircraft) is said to be stalled.
> 
> (The stuff about magnetic inductors is completely fictional but it sounds like something that'd be in a futuristic hover-car.)


	2. The Commons

Lena sipped on her tea, staring at the array of cards in front of her. And her dwindling pile of chips. Not many chips left. Shit.

“So what’ll it be, love?” Jesse asked, mocking her.

“Errrrmmm… hit.”

Jesse chuckled, the brim of his hat shaking with his laughter. “Darlin’, this is poker. You only ‘hit’ in blackjack.”

“So wait, wha- what are my options again? What’s it called when you--”

Hana burst into the room, laughing, headset still on as she made a beeline for the fridge.

“How’s your tourney going?” Jesse asked her crouched form as she dunked her head into the cavernous fridge.

“Oh, fine, fine. Noob tried to roach-hydra into mass colossus immortal. Like, gg ez, ya know?”

“I’m gonna pretend what you jus’ said made any sense to me.”

“Go back to your game, cowboy. I don’t think-- WHAT THE FUCK??”

Three pairs of eyes turned in the direction of the fridge. A shaking, furious Hana held up a small can. The bright cheery letters on the can proclaimed that the offending object was “Citrus Drop Xtreme”.

“What the fuck IS THIS SHIT?”

“You wanted some Mountain Dew, I gotcha some Mountain Dew,” Jesse said, as if it were the most obvious explanation in the world.

“Yes, I wanted some Mountain Dew. Does this look,” Hana snarled, eyes narrowing into predatory slits, “like Mountain Dew?”

Jesse shrugged. “Stuff was on sale.”

Hana gave a short yell of frustration and stormed out of the commons, muttering something about fucking scrubs. Fawkes, who’d also been watching the spectacle, went back to rummaging through the cabinets.

“We got roaches again, eh? ‘cause I could--”

“No!” Jesse shouted at the same time as Lena shouted “Don’t!” None of them had forgotten the last time Winston had mentioned they had roaches and would have to bug-bomb the room. Fawkes may have forgotten about one of the words, and taken the other one a little too literally. A scorched room and a very angry gorilla later, it was decided that Junkrat not participate in any future pest removal.

“Fine, fine.  Telling ya, still cleaned out those roaches, didn't it?  Aha! Gotcha.” Junkrat reached into the cabinet, finding his loot – a nice package of cookies, which instantly piqued Lena’s attention.

“Oi! Got anymore of that?”

“Ah…” he rummaged through the cabinet, managing to find a second package, which he tossed over to her. “Here ya go, mate!” He hobbled away, clutching the package of cookies to his chest. His precious.

“Thanks, love!” She ripped open the wrapper, tossing the first victim of chocolatey goodness into her mouth. “Dark chocolate biscuits. My favorite.”

“They’re called cookies, my dear.”

She blinked at McCree as if he’d just misidentified a dog as a cat. “No, these are biscuits.”

“Cookies.”

“Biscuits.”

“Whatever. So, what’ll it be?” he asked, tilting his head toward the cards.

“Erm… all in?” she said, pulling out the only line of terminology she still remembered from his earlier (and frankly, pitiful) lesson.

The cards were dealt. Of course she lost all her chips.

“Y’know, for a genius you’re really awful at cards.”

Lena rolled her eyes. “Student’s only as good as the teacher ‘n all that, yah?”

“Uh huh. Okay then, how about… rummy?”

***

There comes a point late in the night, where inhibitions are lowered and conversations flow more freely. Perhaps it’s the quiet serenity that comes with that time when the world shuts down a little, and the fireflies come out, and everything quiets down…

Oh, who’s she kidding. It has everything to do with the shot of whiskey she just pounded down her throat. McCree laughs a little as she coughs, eyes watering, and proclaims weakly how “never again” would be a good amount of consumption of that stuff.

He sits there a little while, considering, before he looks at her with that tiny crooked smirk of his. “So you were a test pilot.”

“Yes, and I performed aerodynamic stalls. Many of them.” They both laugh.

“God that kid was a pain in the ass.” He chuckles.

They sit in silence between sips of coffee and tea, neither of them feeling the need to break a silence that contains no awkwardness. She thinks back to the morning, the graph she displayed on that holographic board to embarrass little Timmy, the life she’s somehow lost without having realized…

“What was it like?” he asks, as if he could stare into her soul and read her thoughts.

“It was fun, you know,” she says, nodding.

“Good memories,” he says, more than questions. She nods.

“Hazardous too.”

“Mostly not, actually,” she says. “Lots and lots of simulation time before we test those planes for reals. No one wants to lose an expensive plane. Or a pilot. So by the time we’re up there we’ve already done the maneuvers so many times in the simulator that it just feels like another simulation run.”

“Ever lose a plane?” he asks.

“Actually… there was this one time...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...tfw your framing story gets bloated to the point where it's a chapter by itself. Guess it's 4 vignettes now, not 3.
> 
> Still trying to get the characters down. This is the first fanfic I've seriously tried to write, ever. Please feel free to mention any shittiness. Hell, flame me if you'd like. Won't bother me.
> 
> Citrus Drop Xtreme, with the X, is a real drink. Yes, it is a Mountain Dew knockoff. (-cough- I may have had some today.)
> 
> In case anyone cares, the Starcraft 2 strategies briefly mentioned are real ones.


	3. The Job

Five miles above the Mojave Desert, Tracer went to work.

The clear blue sky above smeared against the horizon and into the haze, the heat ripples coming from the light brown of the dry lake bed below. A few speckles of clouds interrupted the otherwise bichromatic palette of the environment above and around Edwards Air Force base.

It was hot and dry here in the California desert, half a world away from the cold dampness of rainy London. She missed it in a way, but chapped lips were a small price to pay for the opportunity to test the new XLR-29 joint strike fighter. She’d happily accepted when the RAF had proposed to loan her to the US Air Force, to test out the final elements of the design before the cooperatively designed fighter jet went into mass production for both air forces.

So here she sat, in her cramped office, flight-suited and helmeted and gloved, with hundreds of gauges, switches, screens, levers, knobs, and buttons in front of her, traveling eight-tenths the speed of sound, coasting in the smooth air above a giant empty bowl of land.

This was home.

Her radio crackled to life. “Tracer, this is Chase 1. Ready for FAC-one disengagement test. Proceed on your mark.”

“Acknowledged. Disengaging FAC-one… now.”

 

***

 

“FAC”?

“Flight Augmentation Computer. All modern fighter jets are at least partially computer controlled. The pilot doesn’t move the control surfaces, but she essentially uses the joystick to tell the computer what she’d like the plane to do, and the computer tells the plane what to do to execute the desired maneuver.”

“Sound complicated,” Jesse drawled. “All these ‘puters. What happened to just eyeballin’ it, trusting your instincts?”

Lena took a sip of her tea. “Ha. Believe me, most of us have the same sentiment. It turns out that all modern fighters are inherently unstable. Without the assistance of the computer you’d lose control fairly quickly.”

“Unstable? Sounds dangerous. Can’t them geniuses just design somethin’ that’s, y’know… less unstable?”

“They could. But thank about what stable means – something that doesn’t change direction easily. That’s not a property you want for an air superiority fighter.”

Jesse nodded. “All right, granted. So… wait. Why are you turning this… FAC thing off again?”

“Sometimes you need to know how long the average pilot can fly the plane unassisted. Useful data.”

“But you ain’t any average pilot, darlin’.”

She smiled into her mug of tea. “You’re a real charmer, you.”

 

***

 

“Initiating… now.” She flipped the protective cover, and without hesitation pressed the button to disengage the flight augmentation computer.

“ALERT! ALERT! Flight computer, offline! ALERT! ALERT! Flight computer, offline!”

“Thanks, Ronald,” she muttered under her breath.

 

***

 

“Wait, Ronald?”

“Jesse, if you’re going to interrupt me every five seconds...”

“But who’s this Ronald? I don’t remember no Ronald.”

She laughed softly. “Sorry. Ronald is what I called the CAWS.”

“...CAWS? The hell... It’s like you’re speaking a different language.”

“Heh. Sorry, I didn’t quite realize how much jargon we had for what we did. CAWS is Cockpit Aural Warning System. For important setting changes and malfunctions it’s important the pilot is absolutely aware of what’s going on, so they programmed the plane to say it in a voice that’s specifically designed to be irritating, so there’s no chance you can miss it.”

“But Ronald?”

“Ronald was someone from my elementary school that I wanted to punch every day.”

Jesse swirled the remnants of his coffee, chuckling. “Testin’ that stiff British upper lip restraint, eh?”

“Oh believe me, it was tested.” She shuddered a little at the memory. “Had such a grating voice too. ‘Oh, Lane-nuh, yer head looks like you got a mop stuck to ya.’ Annoying kid. It’s all right, though. Last reunion I went to, I was a test pilot and he was working the night shift at a sardine factory, so.”

Jesse was staring at her intently. “Y’know, your hair does look kinda like--”

“Don’t. Start.” As if to betray her or to prove that it was capable of comedic timing, a lock of her hair descended over her eye. She pursed her lips and blew it back up into place with a motion so practiced it would make any hairstylist weep. She glared at it momentarily, daring it to misbehave under her gaze. It remained obedient… for the moment.

“So anyway, I was… you’re checking your watch? Really?” She grinned, devilishly. “Is it high noon?”

“Har, har. No, it’s time for me to wonder when you’ll get to the part where you crashed an airplane. I’m not gettin’ any younger, ya know.”

“Just in it for the destruction bit, eh?”

Jesse shrugged. “Boys will be boys.”

Tracer rolled her eyes. “All right, all right… so I was, incidentally, testing aerodynamic stalls...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This goddamn story just grows every time I write it. Honestly I don't even know how many chapters it's going to be now. Six maybe?
> 
> FAC, CAWS, and the inherent instability of fighter jets are all real, not fictional, ideas.
> 
> This is what the CAWS ("Ronald") sounds like for a typical commercial airliner. Obviously it's a little different for a military aircraft.  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYeVMOw5v1Q


	4. The Stall

“So every aircraft has what’s referred to as its flight envelope – the range of speeds and altitudes and configurations it’s capable of flying safely in. It all looks good on paper, but it’s up to us to go up and test the plane’s limits experimentally – that’s why it’s referred to as “pushing the envelope”.

Jesse frowned. “So then this flight envelope… is like the plane’s comfort zone?”

“That’s...” Lena considered for a moment. “That’s not a bad way of putting it, actually. Now, just because I know you’ll interrupt me again (Jesse performed a placating “hands-up” gesture at this), in the stall regime, as the plane slows down and approaches the edge of the flight envelope, the first warning you’d get is a wing buffet. You know how metal signs shake and flutter in a strong wind? It’s pretty much like that – as the airflow over the wings slows down and gets turbulent, they start to shake. That’s when… what?”

Jesse himself was shaking silently, as if he were a prop demonstrating the phenomenon Tracer was in the process of describing. He grinned into his mug of coffee, before his silent laughter transmuted into a series of low rumbling chuckles.

Tracer blinked at him. Then raised an eyebrow.

“Clearly something horribly amusing has just taken place without my knowledge,” she deadpanned, in a way that would have easily earned her a place on the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster had it been accepting photo mascot submissions. She took a sip of her tea. Then waited. Then sighed.

“Right then, what’s so funny?”

“Seems to me...” Chuckle. “Seems like even those planes of yours get nervous when they leave their comfort zone, with the shaking and all.”

Glare. Blink. Sip of tea. “...right. So. We were testing stalls...”

 

***

 

“Power’s at flight idle… airspeed now one hundred ninety knots. One eighty… one seventy...”

The airframe began to vibrate, the rumble of the wing buffet reverberating through the plane. It was a clear warning that the impending stall was fast approaching. Well, that and Ronald.

“STALL. STALL. STALL. STALL.”

Sigh. “Thanks, Ronald.”

The shuddering worsened. Tracer held the stick back, keeping the fighter’s nose level as the shuddering wings gradually lost their ability to keep the plane in the sky.

“Getting good data here, Tracer. Go ahead and recover.”

“Roger that, recovering.” She forced the stick full nose-down just as the fighter, at the blurry edge between being in control and not, lurched downward and to the left.

“Compressor stall, left engine. Compressor stall, left engine.” Gauges blinked and flashed. The display containing the readings of the engine instruments turned orange, then red.

“ALERT. Left engine – fail. ALERT. Left engine – fail.”

“Oh, bloody--”

 

***

 

“Wait, wait. I thought you told that little shit an airplane stall has nothing to do with the engines.”

“It doesn’t. But, erm. You know how a jet engine is like a giant fan in the front?” McCree nodded.

“So, the fan blades are in a way like little wings that force air into the engine. In certain situations when the airflow gets disrupted, like during an aerodynamic stall, those fan blades can stall which can then cause the engine to stall.”

“So… an aerodynamic stall can actually lead to the engines stalling.”

“Correct.”

Jesse shook his head. “Is a goddamn miracle anything flies to begin with.”

 

***

 

The terrain spun in front of her, giving her quite the lovely panoramic view of the dry lake bed below, had Tracer actually any time to admire it. The XLR-29 pirouetted out of control, shedding altitude with every passing second. Ronald dutifully noted this.

“Caution. Caution. Sink rate. Sink rate.”

Tracer gritted her teeth as she kicked the rudder pedals again, fighting for any response from her stricken jet. Hard right rudder. It should be counteracting the spin.

Her instruments and the blurry movement of the terrain outside her windshield told her otherwise.

There was a tradition for test pilots to be cool, calm, collected. Part of it was practical – panicking did very little good in a crisis situation. Keeping one’s head about them, working the problem – those were the attributes that led to success. Part of it was pride – if one was to die, at least they’d die with dignity, not screaming all the way down like a newborn child.

Tracer was British, a people who’d already mastered the art of the stiff upper lip, and would even throw in mastery of the understatement for free.

“Tracer! What in the hell is going on over there?”

“Airplane’s bein’ stubborn, is all.”

“Say again, Tracer. Do you have a flight control malfunction?”

The scenery outside continued to whirl across her field of vision. The forces from the airplane’s violent gyrations pinned her to her seat, as she continued to wrestle with the bucking and lurching forty-ton beast. Ronald again tried to be helpful.

“Altitude. Altitude. Sink rate. Sink rate.” Tracer managed to spare time for an eyeroll between bouts of straining with her controls.

“Tracer, talk to me! What’s wrong?”

“Well, Ronald’s really testin’ my patience, and I’m fighting some serious flight stability issues at the moment, but otherwise I’m rather cheery, love. How are ya?”

A pause on the frequency, and Tracer almost giggled picturing the look that must have been on Chase-1’s face. Finally the comms crackled back to life. “Tracer, this is no joking matter! Are you able to regain control or not?”

She chanced a glance at her altimeter. “Chase-1, I’ll let you know in the next six thousand feet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More than you ever wanted to know regarding compressor stalls:  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQWYhsYfMxE


	5. The Crash

Tracer was in a bit of a sticky situation, which in true understated British fashion, translated into she was completely and utterly screwed.

Ronald wasn’t helping things either. 

“TOO LOW, TERRAIN. TOO LOW, TERRAIN.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Ronald.”

She kicked the rudder pedal again, hard, in an effort to arrest the pinwheeling motion her state-of-the-art fighter was caught in. Nearly a billion dollars of development, and fitted with the latest in electronics, and it was still merely a peasant lorded over by the laws of aerodynamics.

She kicked her pedal again and forced her stick hard right. “C’mon, love. You needta help me out on this!”

It was as if the beast had heard her. The aircraft was still spinning, but its wild gyrations were dampening. Slowly coming back under control. Tracer kicked the rudder and yanked on the stick again, wincing at the forces that pinned her to her seat.

“That’s it, love… I’ve gotcha...”

“TERRAIN, TERRAIN. PULL UP! TERRAIN, TERRAIN. PULL UP!”

“Ronald, I swear you’re being a pain in the arse.”

The computer wasn’t wrong. The desert was rising to meet her at an alarming rate, the big featureless brown bowl of dust filling more and more of her windscreen. She took a quick glance at her altimeter. Not much time left.

Her headset buzzed to life. “Tracer! Tracer!”

“Slightly busy at the moment!”

“Tracer, punch out! Eject!”

She squeezed her eyes shut. It was all she could do to fight down the wave of dizziness that’d come from battling the enormous g-forces for so long. She shook her head, clearing her vision, getting back to work.

“Tracer, eject! Now!”

“Just a few more seconds! I’ve almost got--”

_Clunk_ .

She barely had enough time to process the noise and realize what it was, the actuator that had just been armed.

“You must be jok--”

The latches on her canopy let go, cracking it open ever so slightly, and the rushing airstream past the jet did the rest, flinging it away from the fighter like a piece of paper in a hurricane. With nothing above her now, the rocket motors under her seat fired, propelling her, seat and all, well clear of the corkscrewing jet.

The fighter had one last failsafe. It had detected that she had been too low, and dropping too fast, and had automatically actuated the ejection sequence. It had taken less than a second, and the system had done its job, flinging her away to safety.

Three more seconds, and she would have been dead.

 

***

 

She hit the ground hard, landing on her side. The impact knocked the wind out of her, and she gasped for breath, small inhalations stunted by the searing pain in her chest. The ejection seat had saved her life, but no one said it would be comfortable. 

She weakly unclipped her harness with trembling hands, and fell out of the seat, the last few inches to earth. The desert embraced her. The heat from the baked earth soaked into her clothes. The dust of the ground coated her flight suit. The infinite expanse of desert filled her vision.

Today sky had abandoned her, and ground had won.

She allowed the ground to hug her for a little while longer, as she caught her breath. All hugs became awkward after a time, especially for the British, so she staggered to her feet by force of will.

The world spun. She clung to her seat and scrunched her eyes shut, and waited. The feeling subsided after a little while, leaving behind a throbbing headache and the sharp soreness in her ribs. She chanced a glance around. The plume of black smoke defiled the crisp blue of the western sky. An ugly, black, billowy monument to failure.

She’d just about started thinking of a plan to get out of here when the sharp whine of the rescue VTOL’s engines pierced the quiet morning air.

 

***

 

She’d barely received some treatment for her bruised ribs before she was summoned to the debriefing.

The cacophony could be heard from down the hall, and it only intensified as she proceeded down the corridor. Voices in heated argument, talking over one another. She hoped vainly that it wasn’t coming from the debriefing room. The assault of noise when she opened the door shattered that hope.

The… as they would say, “animated discussion” was fully underway, and even the British contingent was getting into it, defying centuries of practiced British repression. In another time and place, this would be funny. Unfortunately, this was not another time and place.

_Men. And their dick-measuring. Predictable._

“Your bloody plane almost killed our test pilot!”

The American general jabbed a finger in her direction. She groaned inwardly. She’d hoped to have been unnoticed for a little while longer.

“Your test pilot is right there! She’s the picture of health! And she crashed our aircraft!”

“I will not dignify that with a response. Our test pilot--”

“Do you know in how many of the fourteen simulations that stall test resulted in the loss of the aircraft? I’ll give you two guesses, but you’ll only need one.”

“You know as well as I do that a sideslip was induced in the majority of those stall simulations.” The British general stabbed the table with his finger, as if the figures were etched in the surface in front of him. “That sideslip caused the failure of the CFM-74 eng--”

Lena silently walked over to the single conspicuously empty chair in the room, directly in the middle of the table. Given what was obviously coming next, she was almost expecting the existence of a mustache-twirling villain uttering the classic “ve have vays of making you talk...”

She took a seat and idly focused on the bulging forehead vein of the beet-red American general. “The CFM-74 engine was tested again and again in simulations. All of the simulations indicated a resilience against flameout in sideslip situations. All of them!”

“The simulations are wrong,” she blurted out before she realized she was.

The American general’s head snapped to lock directly onto her. “Excuse me?” he asked, his voice venomous.

Tracer was a test pilot. Death was barely worth being scared of. This man, who she decided internally would be “tomato-head”, was hardly intimidating.

“The simulations are wrong,” she said again.

“And… what makes you think you’re qualified to say that?”

“Because, if your simulations were accurate, your plane wouldn’t be a smoking hole in the ground right now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An engine that was known to suffer compressor stalls and flame-out in a sideslip, as depicted in the previous and this chapter, was actually one that was installed on the F-14 Tomcat. It was a contributing cause to the accident that killed the Navy's first female carrier-based fighter pilot, Kara Hultgreen.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Hultgreen#Death


	6. The Widowmaker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which all of the aerodynamics bullshit I've made you read in the last five chapters finally becomes worth it (including on truly awful pun)... I hope.

Jesse slapped his knee, loud guffaws echoing in the tiny space of the mess. “Ohhh… that’s rich. Lena, you think about being a comedian if Overwatch goes under again. So what happened after that?”

Lena shrugged. “Nothing terribly exciting. Inquiries, post-crash analyses. Mostly it was frustrating, not being able to fly. After a few more simulations it turned out that the accident sequence I encountered could happen fairly easily. Tomato-face threw another fit.”

“And you were fine?”

“My ribs were a little sore for about a week, but that was about it. Came out of it rather well, all things considered.”

“Mm.” Jesse nodded, slowly. “Didja stay on with the program after that?”

She shook her head. “They had to completely redesign the engine. It took them a couple of years, and I was reassigned back to London a few weeks after that crash. Shortly after I received a call from Overwatch’s experimental flight program, and,” she laughed half-heartedly, pointing to the faint electric-blue glow seeping through her sweater, “you know the rest.”

“Yeah. I do.” He stared at her a long moment, wearing the face that’d no doubt won him quite a bit at the poker table. Even as she stared down at her mug she could feel his gaze on her, pinning her in place. Maybe if she waited him out, he’d drop it. She hoped against hope.

“Lena...”

She shook her head. “No, Jesse.”

“Lena. I mightna’ be the most educated, but I ain’t completely stupid, either.”

“Jesse...”

“This don’t have to be hard, y’know. I ain’t blind. I see how it’s tearing you up, just lookin’ at you. Talk to her. Maybe she remembers, maybe she don’t. But you gotta try.”

She folds her arms over her chest, pointedly focusing on something, anything in her visual field, minus Jesse. It was dumb, shameful even, but if she’d stop lying to herself for one moment she’d admit she was…

“...afraid,” Jesse says, squinting as if the rest of her was print just barely too fine to read. There’s no gloating in his tone, no sense of victory. Lena...”

“You’re right,” she blurts out. Somehow it’s easier out here in the open, without that swirling nebulous quality about it, that slight twinge that makes falling asleep just that little bit harder, blurs her thoughts just that little bit out of focus. King’s Row is still fresh in her memory. The physical trauma was easy to fix, as it always was in the hands of the masterful Angela Ziegler, but the limits of nanotechnology did not extend beyond the physical.

“Lena Oxton,” Jesse says, his firm voice jostling her thoughts, forcing her to look up.

“You’re Lena Oxton, famed test pilot. You took dangerous flyin’ machines--”

“They weren’t that dangerous. There’d been sufficient testing--”

“Quiet. You took dangerous flyin’ machines with all those goddamn acronyms up into that sky. You’ve flown planes that would scare the bejeesus out of me and a whole lotta other people. You came within seconds of death, and for you it was just another day."  He narrowed his eyes, lining up his shot.

"So tell me, Lena Oxton: are you a coward?”

 

***

 

She went by many names.

Before, she was Gérard’s wife. Then, the hostage, before Overwatch recovered her.

The murderer. The traitor. The Widowmaker.

And now, the broken one.

But to Lena, she was simply Amélie.

 

***

 

Angela had warned her that this wasn’t the best idea, that it would take weeks, if not months (if ever) to undo Talon’s neural reconditioning. Lena insisted.

So now she found herself standing at the double doors, one thin slice of metal and glass that might as well have been rock and iron. She stared forward, awaiting a showdown with the door that wasn’t coming.

Aircraft have their comfort zones, as Jesse had said. People did too. She had no simulations for this, no preparation. To think about it more would be to paralyze herself, at this rate. She’s outside her flight envelope on this one.

_Are you a coward, Lena Oxton?_

She stares at the door. Takes a deep breath. Gathering her courage, she tells herself. She shivers.

She’s stalling.

She wishes she could know what she’ll find in there. Mockery? Recognition? Maybe something she’ll be able to handle. Maybe not.

But she needs to know.

She takes the step forward before she can convince herself not to, and another. Relying on inertia, now. That disconcerting feeling, like the floor’s dropping out from beneath her.

She’s in freefall now, and she hopes she can work it out before she hits the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it for this one, I'm afraid. What happens next is, as they say, an exercise left to the reader.
> 
> I'm always annoyed when fanfic authors write gigantic author's notes, and I'm being a little hypocritical here, and I hope you'll forgive me. I wish to thank those of you that came along with me on this journey that was my first fanfic. I wish I'd updated faster. Perfectionism is the enemy of the good, as they say. My original prompt was to answer a request for some widowtracer, and somehow that planned one-shot became a bloated six-parter. And in the end, I suppose that never quite materialized.
> 
> Also, on the off-chance that someone will be interested in my sub-par writing, I'm looking for a beta. The ideal candidate will be someone who's into Pharmercy, someone who can be gentle but truthful with criticism (including not being afraid to tell me when something is awful), and someone who enjoys the craft and discussion of writing. Inquire within.
> 
> Writing is by definition a selfish activity; we write in the hopes that someone will read our work, to share in what we've created. So it would only be appropriate if I expressed my heartfelt thanks to you once again, for reading.


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